Alien Civilizations: Dead…or Hiding?

Scientists have long questioned the absence of evidence for intelligent alien life. The Fermi paradox, for example, ponders the strange contradiction between the lack of evidence for alien civilizations and the seemingly high probability of their existence. So many habitable planets, so many stars, and yet not a single trace of alien life.

Their reasoning is that, while the emergence of life may very well be common throughout the universe, it’s fragile and simply does not evolve quickly enough to survive, leading to early extinction.

Most of the fossils we’ll find (if any) during our search for life, they say, will likely be from “extinct microbial life, not from multicellular species such as dinosaurs or humanoids.” They call this solution to the Fermi paradox the “Gaian Bottleneck.”

But that’s not all.

One of the first posts I ever wrote on this website asked the very same question: Where are all the aliens? And to me, it’s not only a question of whether or not they exist, it’s also a question of time. After all, humans represent only a handful of seconds on Earth’s clock, so to speak.

Who’s to say aliens haven’t already visited our planet, long before life existed here? Who’s to say they won’t visit long after we’re gone? And vice versa. Given how big the universe is, we’d be very lucky to run into intelligent extraterrestrial life at this particular location at this particular time. And the target is always moving.

To me, they (aliens) must have succumbed to the periodic extinction events (like a meteorite/s w/c triggers extinction/s) so an alien civilization would have no chance of colonizing other planets in the universe. Think there is a term for that but it escapes me at the moment.
So the only way another alien civilization could visit us is through their generational ships that they should have built in order to escape an extinction event on their planets.
Maybe that is what is in store for us…